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March 2023

We are pleased to present our latest offering of pi - our March 2023 release! This page helps summarise the areas of the dashboard we have Added, Changed, or Fixed meaning you can make a quick and informed decision on when to upgrade to the latest release.

For our piSaaS customers, we also include any platform changes we have made to piSaaS as we continue to evolve the solution.

Here’s what’s included in the release;

Added

Added a new date field to the User area, that allows you to set a date at which the user will become disabled called ‘user expiration date’. The user will become automatically disabled on the date specified.

The new fields can be seen at the very bottom of the screenshot

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The Userflow library has been integrated into the dashboard to enable customisable guided tour of the dashboard functionality. Userflow provides dynamic flows that allow users to familiarise with the dashboard features in a structured and repeatable manner.

The Userflow functionality can be enabled through the UI, from the Dashboard Configuration screen, and then selecting the Global Variables tab.

To enable the feature, the checkbox should be ticked and a valid Userflow token and userId needs to be provided:

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The values can also be set using three new System Variables:

• USERFLOW_ENABLED

• USERFLOW_TOKEN

• USERFLOW_USER_ID

More information about the usage of these variables can be found in our System Variables page.

Below are a couple of examples of how Userflows can look after this has been enabled in the dashboard, and content created in Useflow.

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Changed

User emails had previously been stored in the database in the case that they are entered in the user tab. However, when used by the system, the email address is always converted to lower case for consistency and this is how it is displayed in the UI.

To ensure consistency between the database and the value that the system users and displays, emails will now be automatically converted to lower case when a user is saved to the repository database. All email addresses already present in the repository database will also be converted to lower case to ensure a clean baseline for the data. This will happen whenever the repository database migrations are run, for instance when the dashboard starts up or when the database is restored.

Previously, the way in which the keys were generated to allow for the translation of certain elements of the Dashboard tied it to the specifics of that particular Dashboard installation. This meant that a Dashboard with the same data - even if done via export/import - but on a different system would be unable to use the same translation files.

Now, the key generation has been made system agnostic by instead depending upon the original, untranslated version of the values. This allows Dashboards that share the same data or simply have some overlap in terms of their translatable values to use the same files to achieve multilingual support.

Fixed

If configured without an entry in the SID field, an Oracle SID data connection could cause the Dashboard to continuously load. This bug has been fixed and better error handling has been added to mitigate and locate any similar issues that may already exist or arise in the future.

When displaying category objects across the top of the dashboard, some users were having issues with the panel resizing rapidly and snapping back when adding values to a multi-picker. This glitch has been improved by setting a standard height for the multi-picker input panel, meaning it now appears as a larger panel when empty instead of having to expand as values are added.

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Fix jpeg and png api endpoints to download charts of these 2 types. There were errors when using these in with the previous version of the app.

piSaaS Platform

As a piSaaS customer, you can now connect to a database that is running without public access, by routing through a bastion host.

To make use of this new feature, you will need to raise a support case with our Service Desk team, who will start the process of upgrading your piSaaS instance (where needed). They will need to some further details from you;

• the host URL of the database

• the IP address of the bastion/jump host

Administrator users have access to restore a repository database to a point in time, this can be requested by raising a support case with our Service Desk team.

Administrators can select from a list of backups and request an automated restore. During the process, a snapshot of the repository database it taken before the restoration to the desired point in history occurs.

Previously, for each piSaaS instance deployed, a separate Renderer and Pirana service would also be deployed. These services are infrequently used, and so represented a great number of resources that could be redeployed into making the Renderer more responsive and stable.

Moving forward, piSaaS instances will now share this load-balanced, highly scalable Renderer solution that will represent an uplift in performance for all piSaaS users.